Dr Constance L. McDermott
About
Dr Constance L. McDermott is an Associate Professor and Jackson Senior Research Fellow in Land Use and Environmental Change at Oriel College and the Environmental Change Institute.
A social scientist by training, she has over 30 years' experience conducting research and applied work on state, civil society and market-based approaches to the governance of forests and related supply chains, and the nexus of forests with climate, agriculture and land use change.
Her work, which spans the Americas, Europe, Asia and Africa, includes a strong focus on issues of social equity in environmental conservation initiatives. This includes research on the social, economic, governance and biodiversity dimensions of reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation.
Expertise
- Forest and land use governance
- Food and fibre supply chain governance, including sustainability and legality certification, embodied deforestation initiatives
- Forests and climate, including the UNFCCC mechanisms. Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD+)
Selected publications
- Transforming land use governance: Global targets without equity miss the mark (2023)
- Forest tenure and the Sustainable Development Goals – A critical view (2020)
- The interplay of global governance with domestic and local access: Case studies of FLEGT VPAs in Ghana and Indonesia (2019)
- Transparency and sustainability in global commodity supply chains (2019)
- The Ecological Limits of Poverty Alleviation in an African Forest-Agriculture Landscape (2019)
- Scaling up sustainability in commodity agriculture: Transferability of governance mechanisms across the coffee and cattle sectors in Brazil (2019)
- The role of supply-chain initiatives in reducing deforestation (2018)
- Understanding Poverty in Cash-crop Agro-forestry Systems: Evidence from Ghana and Ethiopia (2018)
- Are more prescriptive laws better? Transforming REDD+ safeguards into national legislation (2017)
Media experience
Dr McDermott has extensive experience of interviews including for radio and print.
Recent media work
Languages
English